You thought wrong. C# is a programming language with a standard library and lots of platform-specific libraries, just like every language in existence other than Java.
which basically means Linux is a second-class citizen where things only partially work, which is just how Microsoft wants it.
You aren't listening. Mono applications on Linux don't use Winforms, they use Gtk#. They work fully, 100% on Linux. They are like C or C++ or Python applications on Linux.
As a bonus, you also get a Windows compatibility library (Winforms), just like Windows gets a Mono compatibility library (Gtk# on Windows).
With Mono and Silverlight, MS can now claim they're "playing fair", and still keep their hand to themselves to screw whoever they feel like. Don't buy into it.
By that argument, we should all abandon C and C++ because it runs on both Windows and Linux. Get real!
The problem here is not that people are using Tor, the problem is that many services use unencrypted connections and unencrypted passwords. Tor is merely a convenient way of exposing this, but the problem would exist even without Tor.
So, don't blame Tor, blame service providers that use unencrypted authentication, and blame people using these kinds of services.
There's no question that warrantless surveillance is helpful against terrorists.
Unfortunately, it's even more helpful for presidents wanting to blackmail political opponents and establishing an autocracy. Even if Bush is too dopey for this sort of takeover, future presidents won't be.
It is intrinsically impossible to guarantee perfect safety in a democracy. If we want to have freedoms, we have to accept a certain risk that some nut will blow us up.
Perhaps the right wingers will understand it by analogy with an often-made economic point: "Just like an efficient market requires a natural level of unemployment, a functioning democracy requires a natural level of deaths from crime and terrorism."
Allow me to be the first to say that the gnu folks get a ton of shit wrong all the time, too. Just because they're doing something that miguel is also doing doesn't in any way vindicate miguel, it just condemns gnu.
Sure, everybody "gets shit wrong". That's why you need to understand and discuss the issues, not the people. And the issue remains this: nobody has demonstrated a credible threat to Mono from Microsoft patents. If you have one, please share it. Your ad hominems against the FSF are completely irrelevant to anything.
How about #6,920,461 and #6,959,294? I can't really claim that I understand, but implementing complete WinForms behavior seems difficult without hitting both patents.
Mono programs don't usually use Winforms, they use Gtk#. Winforms is an optional compatibility library for people porting from Windows to Linux. If '461 were enforced, it wouldn't affect Mono, it would simply mean that people porting from Windows would have to do a little more work.
'294 is a patent on context sensitive help. It's not essential, nor specific to Mono or C#.
Well, when it comes to.NET, there is a crap ton of copyrighted and patented stuff, and Mono breaks a lot of em, and they know it. They just know Microsoft won't do anything, since they are semi-partners and all.
So, get real and stop spreading FUD! Miguel may have gone slightly insane, but that doesn't affect the status of Mono. Nobody has ever been able to show a Microsoft patent that Mono infringes. If you can demonstrate one, please share it.
So-called "open source leaders" are often experts only on the software they are developing; their opinions on anything other software, legal issues, politics are worth no more and no less than those of anybody else.
When they have a case of foot-in-mouth, unfortunately, they hurt not just themselves but also the projects they are responsible for. Miguel's silly statements about OOXML now add yet more suspicions to the Mono project and its relations to Microsoft and give other people and companies ammunition for FUD.
So, Miguel, Linus, etc.: please stick to using your name and reputation for talking about the projects you're responsible for and are clearly experts on. You do everybody a favor if you post other opinions or rants under a pseudonym.
Microsoft's Office XML Standard is clearly bad in a number of respects: unnecessary deviation from established standards, encapsulation of binary formats, and backwards compatibility with obsolete MS Office formats. It does, however, indeed have the advantage that it's easier to import for code that's already been written to import the old binary formats. On the other hand, it's just as clearly harder to process using XML tools.
Now, the question is: are the primary use cases for which we should design an XML office format office suite input/output routine, or are the primary use cases XML processing.
Well, let's see: there are half a dozen office suites around: MS, Gnome, KDE, Apple, and a couple of commercial ones. Each of those needs to implement a reader/writer once. On the other hand, there are thousands of uses and implementors for information extraction and transformation of office documents.
Seems pretty clear to me that we should optimize XML office formats for XML processing, not for the convenience of the implementors of office suites. And that, in a nutshell, is why Microsoft's office format is worse than ODF.
Because I support companies that support free software, and choose not to do business with companies that don't.
But this is clearly an issue of whether licenses are followed, not about a company doing "good" or "bad".
That's not the issue I was asking about.
If there's something I get annoyed about, it's not about companies properly using licenses, but people like you who try to impose a personal code of ethics on companies who only use the code the way the original devs intended it to
I'm not "imposing" anything on anybody, nor is open source a question of "ethics" to me. All I did was ask about Fog Creek's contributions to open source.
You're jumping to conclusions and apparently have an ax to grind.
"As long as Apple delivers you a BSD command line, a C compiler, and a kernel API, the rest of the world and open source can go to hell." As long as Apple delivers that, Apple can't lock me in to Apple.
Well, how nice for you. But the rest of the world can't and doesn't want to limit itself to the BSD command line or a C compiler, and they need to use something.
Apple's answer, Cocoa and Objective C is a surefire lock-in, in addition to sucking technically. Microsoft's answer,.NET, is also a lock-in. Sun's answer, Java, is semi-lock-in and sucks almost as badly as Apple's answer.
Open source, however, has excellent answers these days: Python, C#, Ruby, Haskell, OCAML, and D provide unencumbered languages and runtimes and full access to open source kernel and server APIs, GUI libraries, and platforms. (The only problem is that uninformed naysayers like you keep badmouthing them.)
Now, which platform do you suggest GUI and application developers not wanting to be locked in should build on?
Everyone's PR department makes unfounded and deceptive statements.
And when they do, I criticize them for it. That is no excuse to let Apple get away with it. "Johnny did it, too" is not a valid excuse for misbehavior.
For that matter, Cocoa is no more proprietary as a standard than Qt or Gtk. There's a single implementation of each, and the API is defined by what that implementation does.
That's idiotic hair splitting. Gtk+ is an open source implementation that is owned by nobody (hence, non-proprietary), while both the Cocoa implementation and definition are proprietary to Apple.
I wish you were right.
This is not a question of "wishing", this is a question of deliberate misrepresentation: Apple and people like you claim with no evidence that the Linux desktop is "in trouble" or that Apple's offering is either better or more successful.
They're also irrelevant to me as a free UNIX user.
Yes, Mono is irrelevant to you in every way, we know that. I'm simply showed that Mono is relevant to the Linux community, while you have failed to show that any of Apple's open source releases are relevant to any large community.
You might be able to convince me that Mono may be able to have Microsoft's strings removed, but it wouldn't have Microsoft's support if they didn't believe they had those strings in their hands, so don't try and tell me they don't exist.
I think it would be great if Microsoft supported Mono; too bad they don't. I also think it would be great if Apple supported Mono, but they are busy building their proprietary Objective C and Cocoa platforms.
Especially when at the same time you see strings attached to Apple's open source releases.
Where did I say there are "strings attached"? The problem with Apple's open source releases is simply that they are, for the most part, useless to most of the open source community.
Mono and.NET completely replace the native API with their own bindings. No part of a program in.NET (or Java, or any other similar API) is directly compatible with any native OS code. You can't develop software using it that links with native code. You can't link native code with it directly, and code you write in it can't be directly used except by Mono or.NET.
Bullshit. Mono and.NET have full and complete access to C pointers, C data structures, and C libraries. In addition, most major open source libraries have high quality C# interfaces and libraries. And you can use Mono and.NET code from any CLR language, including C and C++.
The Wikipedia article is correct and confirms what I'm saying:
As the rules are written, there is no requirement that an American be sought to fill a position, nor given preference in layoffs unless the company is "H-1B dependent", i.e. 15 percent or more of its global workforce consists of H-1Bs earning less than $60,000 per year, exempting those who hold masters degrees. Only about one percent of H-1B employers are deemed "H-1B dependent," and even then the employer is only required to "attest" that he was not able to find an American.
Your statement that "They're just justifying an H!B!" is and remains bullshit: employers don't make job postings in order to "justify" an H1B because nobody ever actually asks for such a justification; as the Wikipedia article tells you, all the US government ever wants is an attestation.
I can think of many reasons why Sun would want to use CDDL over GPL
I have no problems with Sun picking a more liberal license than the GPL. But among the many licenses that are more liberal, they handcrafted one that was GPL-incompatible.
Sun is making their TCK freely available to any implementation or derivation of the GPL'd OpenJDK code.
Quite right, which answers your question of how Sun keeps control over Java and the OpenJDK: they control the TCK, they control who gets to use it, and they control their own dual-licensed implementation.
Many projects are dual-licensed, what of it?
You wanted an answer to the question of "How do you maintain control of the development of a GPL'd work?" This is one of several control mechanisms: Sun develops Java under a dual license and has a large non-GPL userbase. That makes forking the Java JDK unrealistic and pretty much ensures continued control by Sun.
Sorry, I was unclear (and a bit confused myself it seems)
You were quite clear, you were simply didn't know the facts. And that's my overall point: the details matter a great deal in evaluating what open source related activities by companies mean. Just because Sun releases a lot of code under the GPL and talks a lot about open source doesn't mean that they actually support the kind of open source that has actually brought us Linux and gcc.
Interesting. I could go in and attack them as irrelevant-to-me, or attack them for being trivial, the way you were attacking Apple's open source contributions a few messages back, but I won't. I'd just like you to think about why.
Of course, they are irrelevant to you as a Mac user. However, they are very relevant and non-trivial to the open source community because several of them are a standard part of Gnome installs (e.g., the Gnome equivalents of iPhoto and Spotlight are written in it).
As for the Mono example, I don't know enough about it to know whether you're showing me a realistic example
You can't even figure out a five line Mono program, yet you go on making all sorts of unfounded and incorrect claims about how Mono is Microsoft's tool to world domination?
The fact is that Mono has some of the best native bindings to Linux and open source libraries of any language, allows direct calls to.so files, and is used for several standard Gnome applications. Most Mono installs don't even bother to install the.NET compatibility libraries because they simply aren't used. Your claims that Mono is some kind of Microsoft path to Linux domination simply have no basis in fact.
As I was saying, I'm not even a Mono developer myself, but the Mono project doesn't deserve to be bad-mouthed by people like you who know nothing about it.
1. Attacking Apple's participation in the open source community because they're Apple and not Red Hat is stupid.
I don't attack them because they're not RedHat, I attack them because they are setting bad, proprietary standards and because their PR department makes unfounded statements.
2. Attacking Apple's participation in the open source community and then trusting Microsoft's participation is insane.
I don't trust Microsoft any more than I trust Apple. Fortunately, I don't have to because none of the software I use depends on either company.
3. Attacking Apple as the source of open source software's problems on the desktop is being willfully blind.
I don't see that open source has any problems on the desktop. What I'm attacking Apple and you for is making unfounded statements, like you just did again.
That's basically it, I'd like the open source community to care about open systems as well.
Apple is not the source of the underlying API in the system. They don't control UNIX, they don't control the platform they're working on, and they have made sure they can't control it.
Apple has full control over Darwin (system calls, file system layer, driver APIs), Quartz, Carbon, Cocoa, Quicktime, AppleScript, Objective-C, and they are using skillfully to control their market. Heck, just look at how they are delivering Objective C 2.0.
Now Microsoft's got a foothold there as well. If I despair, I have reason.
The fact that Mono does the same thing as any other OOP on POSIX and provides reasonable high-level classes (in addition to POSIX!) to access files and sockets bothers you? And how exactly are Cocoa's NSInputStream/NSOutputStream any different?
But below the desktop, at the network and command line, the open APIs were dominant. The same APIs everywhere but Windows, and on Windows you've got a choice of implementations so you CAN run the UNIX command line and Berkeley sockets there as well
Maybe if you lived in a BSD bubble. In the real world, the UNIX/POSIX systems have always had lots of incompatibilities, and in some cases completely different APIs (e.g., IPC, shared memory, networking), and then there were VMS, MacOS, and lots of other systems.
And, frankly, even if you were right, it wouldn't matter. I don't want to program in the UNIX command line, C, and Berkeley sockets for another two decades.
So the desktop is lost to proprietary systems. I came to that conclusion years ago, after I watched all the really interesting windowing platforms and toolkits fall by the wayside leaving the open-source field to KDE and Gnome on X11.
So, basically you're saying that you're miffed that your favorite windowing platform didn't win and you really don't care about GUIs anyway. As long as Apple delivers you a BSD command line, a C compiler, and a kernel API, the rest of the world and open source can go to hell.
And to hell it would go if people like you won out.
I believe admitting the polygraph into evidence is wrong.
On the other hand, this looks like a case in which the only evidence is the statement by the alleged victim, and I also think it's wrong to convict people on that as well; you cannot be certain "beyond a reasonable doubt" merely because someone accuses someone else.
H1B requires they attempt to locate an American to fill the job before giving it to a an immigrant.
That sentence makes no sense. H1B visas are non-immigrant visas; filling an H1B visa means filling a position with a temporary foreign worker. Positions filled with H1B visas do not require job postings.
H1B visas are awarded for specialty occupations, as determined by the US government. The reason so computer programmers can come in on H1B visas is because the US government has determined that there is a shortage in that area. If you don't want any more H1B visas for computer programmers, the US government could simply declare tomorrow that there are enough US programmers.
They routinely go through the motions with the intent of not finding anyone.
Green cards are immigrant visas and require job postings in some cases. And, of course, green-card related job postings are made with the expectation that no US candidate will qualify. There is nothing nefarious about that: if the company were able to fill that position with a US worker, they wouldn't go through the trouble and expense of starting the green card process in the first place! But, again, none of that has anything to do with H1B visas because there are no job posting requirements for H1B visas.
Before you attempt to participate in the immigration debate, you really should get your facts straight and try to understand the basics of the immigration system.
If you didn't live through the start of the open systems revolution you have no idea how messed up things would have been if AT&T had been just another software company like Microsoft, able to act free of regulation.
I did. And, as you may notice, Apple, like Microsoft, is just another software company, free of regulation, which is why I don't trust Apple any more than I trust Microsoft. Futhermore, I also lived through the UNIX wars. Do you remember them? Every UNIX vendor was arguing that they were shipping standard UNIX, only with a better user interface and some useful proprietary stuff on top. That is exactly the argument Apple is making today, and Apple is hurting the UNIX market with that bullshit just like UNIX workstation vendors were hurting each other with it a decade ago.
I have no idea which languages and platforms will be the future for open source, but I do know this much: it will not be something controlled by any of Microsoft, Sun, or Apple, because all three of those companies are competing with open source and would kill it if only they could (except for the parts of open source that does free labor for them, of course--all three of them manage to hoodwink people into that).
Personally, I do most of my development in C, C++, and Python right now, although Mono is getting to the point where it is becoming a realistic choice.
So does Windows NT. That's the same argument that Microsoft used to claim NT was POSIX compliant. Real Windows applications did not use the POSIX API, they used Microsoft's proprietary API. Virtually all real.NET applications, even written under Mono, are going to be written to Microsoft's APIs... not open ones... because damn few people are going to write Mono apps if they don't plan on them being portable to Windows.
NT's POSIX compatibility is indeed just a marketing gimmick--nobody uses it. But Mono/Gtk# has lots of actual users. Here is a lost of Mono/Gtk# applications from 2 years ago; many more have been added, and several ship standard with Ubuntu and Debian.
Set your environment variables, start up a Mono app, it doesn't see them because it's running in the same background VM as the one you started three hours ago as a side effect of running some other Mono app for some unrelated purpose.
$ uname -a Linux box 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Fri Aug 31 00:55:27 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux $ cat test.cs using System; public class Test {
public static void Main() {
Console.WriteLine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariab le("foo"));
} } $ mcs test.cs $ foo=a test.exe a $ foo=b test.exe b $
I don't have any significant Mono projects right now (although I hope to in the future), but I use several Mono programs on Linux (all of them Gtk#-based) and it's a good platform that a lot of people have invested a lot of their time in. Neither the Mono developers nor end users like myself deserve to be hurt by BSD or Apple fanboy propaganda and lies, so cut it out.
[Cocoa/Objective-C] is more open than.NET and Mono.
Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that that were true. So what? What exactly are you arguing? That open source should try to help Apple kill Microsoft and then leave the desktop market to Apple? Or what?
Come on, in your ideal world, what relationship would you like to see between the open source world, Apple, and Microsoft?
Slashdot Mirror
Wait... I thought C# was cross-platform?
You thought wrong. C# is a programming language with a standard library and lots of platform-specific libraries, just like every language in existence other than Java.
which basically means Linux is a second-class citizen where things only partially work, which is just how Microsoft wants it.
You aren't listening. Mono applications on Linux don't use Winforms, they use Gtk#. They work fully, 100% on Linux. They are like C or C++ or Python applications on Linux.
As a bonus, you also get a Windows compatibility library (Winforms), just like Windows gets a Mono compatibility library (Gtk# on Windows).
With Mono and Silverlight, MS can now claim they're "playing fair", and still keep their hand to themselves to screw whoever they feel like. Don't buy into it.
By that argument, we should all abandon C and C++ because it runs on both Windows and Linux. Get real!
The problem here is not that people are using Tor, the problem is that many services use unencrypted connections and unencrypted passwords. Tor is merely a convenient way of exposing this, but the problem would exist even without Tor.
So, don't blame Tor, blame service providers that use unencrypted authentication, and blame people using these kinds of services.
earn to grow and have a civil discussion about whats going on in the computer industry will MS (and other corporate) take notice of what you say.
You mean civil and grown-up enough for the monkey-dancing, chair-throwing CEO of Microsoft? I dunno, I think we have reached that level already.
There's no question that warrantless surveillance is helpful against terrorists.
Unfortunately, it's even more helpful for presidents wanting to blackmail political opponents and establishing an autocracy. Even if Bush is too dopey for this sort of takeover, future presidents won't be.
It is intrinsically impossible to guarantee perfect safety in a democracy. If we want to have freedoms, we have to accept a certain risk that some nut will blow us up.
Perhaps the right wingers will understand it by analogy with an often-made economic point: "Just like an efficient market requires a natural level of unemployment, a functioning democracy requires a natural level of deaths from crime and terrorism."
Allow me to be the first to say that the gnu folks get a ton of shit wrong all the time, too. Just because they're doing something that miguel is also doing doesn't in any way vindicate miguel, it just condemns gnu.
Sure, everybody "gets shit wrong". That's why you need to understand and discuss the issues, not the people. And the issue remains this: nobody has demonstrated a credible threat to Mono from Microsoft patents. If you have one, please share it. Your ad hominems against the FSF are completely irrelevant to anything.
How about #6,920,461 and #6,959,294? I can't really claim that I understand, but implementing complete WinForms behavior seems difficult without hitting both patents.
Mono programs don't usually use Winforms, they use Gtk#. Winforms is an optional compatibility library for people porting from Windows to Linux. If '461 were enforced, it wouldn't affect Mono, it would simply mean that people porting from Windows would have to do a little more work.
'294 is a patent on context sensitive help. It's not essential, nor specific to Mono or C#.
Well, when it comes to .NET, there is a crap ton of copyrighted and patented stuff, and Mono breaks a lot of em, and they know it. They just know Microsoft won't do anything, since they are semi-partners and all.
.NET as well, you know.
Ah, I see. And I suppose the GNU project is in on the conspiracy as well? They are producing their own, independent implementation of C#, CLR, and
So, get real and stop spreading FUD! Miguel may have gone slightly insane, but that doesn't affect the status of Mono. Nobody has ever been able to show a Microsoft patent that Mono infringes. If you can demonstrate one, please share it.
So-called "open source leaders" are often experts only on the software they are developing; their opinions on anything other software, legal issues, politics are worth no more and no less than those of anybody else.
When they have a case of foot-in-mouth, unfortunately, they hurt not just themselves but also the projects they are responsible for. Miguel's silly statements about OOXML now add yet more suspicions to the Mono project and its relations to Microsoft and give other people and companies ammunition for FUD.
So, Miguel, Linus, etc.: please stick to using your name and reputation for talking about the projects you're responsible for and are clearly experts on. You do everybody a favor if you post other opinions or rants under a pseudonym.
Microsoft's Office XML Standard is clearly bad in a number of respects: unnecessary deviation from established standards, encapsulation of binary formats, and backwards compatibility with obsolete MS Office formats. It does, however, indeed have the advantage that it's easier to import for code that's already been written to import the old binary formats. On the other hand, it's just as clearly harder to process using XML tools.
Now, the question is: are the primary use cases for which we should design an XML office format office suite input/output routine, or are the primary use cases XML processing.
Well, let's see: there are half a dozen office suites around: MS, Gnome, KDE, Apple, and a couple of commercial ones. Each of those needs to implement a reader/writer once. On the other hand, there are thousands of uses and implementors for information extraction and transformation of office documents.
Seems pretty clear to me that we should optimize XML office formats for XML processing, not for the convenience of the implementors of office suites. And that, in a nutshell, is why Microsoft's office format is worse than ODF.
My question would be why you care?
Because I support companies that support free software, and choose not to do business with companies that don't.
But this is clearly an issue of whether licenses are followed, not about a company doing "good" or "bad".
That's not the issue I was asking about.
If there's something I get annoyed about, it's not about companies properly using licenses, but people like you who try to impose a personal code of ethics on companies who only use the code the way the original devs intended it to
I'm not "imposing" anything on anybody, nor is open source a question of "ethics" to me. All I did was ask about Fog Creek's contributions to open source.
You're jumping to conclusions and apparently have an ax to grind.
Ah, another piece of commercial, proprietary software derived from VNC.
https://www.copilot.com/press/faq/
Here's a serious question: has Fog Creek ever given anything back to the open source community?
"As long as Apple delivers you a BSD command line, a C compiler, and a kernel API, the rest of the world and open source can go to hell." As long as Apple delivers that, Apple can't lock me in to Apple.
.NET, is also a lock-in. Sun's answer, Java, is semi-lock-in and sucks almost as badly as Apple's answer.
Well, how nice for you. But the rest of the world can't and doesn't want to limit itself to the BSD command line or a C compiler, and they need to use something.
Apple's answer, Cocoa and Objective C is a surefire lock-in, in addition to sucking technically. Microsoft's answer,
Open source, however, has excellent answers these days: Python, C#, Ruby, Haskell, OCAML, and D provide unencumbered languages and runtimes and full access to open source kernel and server APIs, GUI libraries, and platforms. (The only problem is that uninformed naysayers like you keep badmouthing them.)
Now, which platform do you suggest GUI and application developers not wanting to be locked in should build on?
Everyone's PR department makes unfounded and deceptive statements.
And when they do, I criticize them for it. That is no excuse to let Apple get away with it. "Johnny did it, too" is not a valid excuse for misbehavior.
For that matter, Cocoa is no more proprietary as a standard than Qt or Gtk. There's a single implementation of each, and the API is defined by what that implementation does.
That's idiotic hair splitting. Gtk+ is an open source implementation that is owned by nobody (hence, non-proprietary), while both the Cocoa implementation and definition are proprietary to Apple.
I wish you were right.
This is not a question of "wishing", this is a question of deliberate misrepresentation: Apple and people like you claim with no evidence that the Linux desktop is "in trouble" or that Apple's offering is either better or more successful.
They're also irrelevant to me as a free UNIX user.
Yes, Mono is irrelevant to you in every way, we know that. I'm simply showed that Mono is relevant to the Linux community, while you have failed to show that any of Apple's open source releases are relevant to any large community.
You might be able to convince me that Mono may be able to have Microsoft's strings removed, but it wouldn't have Microsoft's support if they didn't believe they had those strings in their hands, so don't try and tell me they don't exist.
I think it would be great if Microsoft supported Mono; too bad they don't. I also think it would be great if Apple supported Mono, but they are busy building their proprietary Objective C and Cocoa platforms.
Especially when at the same time you see strings attached to Apple's open source releases.
Where did I say there are "strings attached"? The problem with Apple's open source releases is simply that they are, for the most part, useless to most of the open source community.
Mono and .NET completely replace the native API with their own bindings. No part of a program in .NET (or Java, or any other similar API) is directly compatible with any native OS code. You can't develop software using it that links with native code. You can't link native code with it directly, and code you write in it can't be directly used except by Mono or .NET.
.NET have full and complete access to C pointers, C data structures, and C libraries. In addition, most major open source libraries have high quality C# interfaces and libraries. And you can use Mono and .NET code from any CLR language, including C and C++.
Bullshit. Mono and
Your statement that "They're just justifying an H!B!" is and remains bullshit: employers don't make job postings in order to "justify" an H1B because nobody ever actually asks for such a justification; as the Wikipedia article tells you, all the US government ever wants is an attestation.
Trivial and of no consequence? Oh do tell, what changes are needed?
Any of the GPL-compatible licenses on this page would do: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/
I can think of many reasons why Sun would want to use CDDL over GPL
I have no problems with Sun picking a more liberal license than the GPL. But among the many licenses that are more liberal, they handcrafted one that was GPL-incompatible.
Sun is making their TCK freely available to any implementation or derivation of the GPL'd OpenJDK code.
Quite right, which answers your question of how Sun keeps control over Java and the OpenJDK: they control the TCK, they control who gets to use it, and they control their own dual-licensed implementation.
Many projects are dual-licensed, what of it?
You wanted an answer to the question of "How do you maintain control of the development of a GPL'd work?" This is one of several control mechanisms: Sun develops Java under a dual license and has a large non-GPL userbase. That makes forking the Java JDK unrealistic and pretty much ensures continued control by Sun.
Sorry, I was unclear (and a bit confused myself it seems)
You were quite clear, you were simply didn't know the facts. And that's my overall point: the details matter a great deal in evaluating what open source related activities by companies mean. Just because Sun releases a lot of code under the GPL and talks a lot about open source doesn't mean that they actually support the kind of open source that has actually brought us Linux and gcc.
Interesting. I could go in and attack them as irrelevant-to-me, or attack them for being trivial, the way you were attacking Apple's open source contributions a few messages back, but I won't. I'd just like you to think about why.
.so files, and is used for several standard Gnome applications. Most Mono installs don't even bother to install the .NET compatibility libraries because they simply aren't used. Your claims that Mono is some kind of Microsoft path to Linux domination simply have no basis in fact.
Of course, they are irrelevant to you as a Mac user. However, they are very relevant and non-trivial to the open source community because several of them are a standard part of Gnome installs (e.g., the Gnome equivalents of iPhoto and Spotlight are written in it).
As for the Mono example, I don't know enough about it to know whether you're showing me a realistic example
You can't even figure out a five line Mono program, yet you go on making all sorts of unfounded and incorrect claims about how Mono is Microsoft's tool to world domination?
The fact is that Mono has some of the best native bindings to Linux and open source libraries of any language, allows direct calls to
As I was saying, I'm not even a Mono developer myself, but the Mono project doesn't deserve to be bad-mouthed by people like you who know nothing about it.
1. Attacking Apple's participation in the open source community because they're Apple and not Red Hat is stupid.
I don't attack them because they're not RedHat, I attack them because they are setting bad, proprietary standards and because their PR department makes unfounded statements.
2. Attacking Apple's participation in the open source community and then trusting Microsoft's participation is insane.
I don't trust Microsoft any more than I trust Apple. Fortunately, I don't have to because none of the software I use depends on either company.
3. Attacking Apple as the source of open source software's problems on the desktop is being willfully blind.
I don't see that open source has any problems on the desktop. What I'm attacking Apple and you for is making unfounded statements, like you just did again.
That's basically it, I'd like the open source community to care about open systems as well.
I do, which is precisely why I opposed Apple.
Apple is not the source of the underlying API in the system. They don't control UNIX, they don't control the platform they're working on, and they have made sure they can't control it.
Apple has full control over Darwin (system calls, file system layer, driver APIs), Quartz, Carbon, Cocoa, Quicktime, AppleScript, Objective-C, and they are using skillfully to control their market. Heck, just look at how they are delivering Objective C 2.0.
Now Microsoft's got a foothold there as well. If I despair, I have reason.
The fact that Mono does the same thing as any other OOP on POSIX and provides reasonable high-level classes (in addition to POSIX!) to access files and sockets bothers you? And how exactly are Cocoa's NSInputStream/NSOutputStream any different?
But below the desktop, at the network and command line, the open APIs were dominant. The same APIs everywhere but Windows, and on Windows you've got a choice of implementations so you CAN run the UNIX command line and Berkeley sockets there as well
Maybe if you lived in a BSD bubble. In the real world, the UNIX/POSIX systems have always had lots of incompatibilities, and in some cases completely different APIs (e.g., IPC, shared memory, networking), and then there were VMS, MacOS, and lots of other systems.
And, frankly, even if you were right, it wouldn't matter. I don't want to program in the UNIX command line, C, and Berkeley sockets for another two decades.
So the desktop is lost to proprietary systems. I came to that conclusion years ago, after I watched all the really interesting windowing platforms and toolkits fall by the wayside leaving the open-source field to KDE and Gnome on X11.
So, basically you're saying that you're miffed that your favorite windowing platform didn't win and you really don't care about GUIs anyway. As long as Apple delivers you a BSD command line, a C compiler, and a kernel API, the rest of the world and open source can go to hell.
And to hell it would go if people like you won out.
I believe admitting the polygraph into evidence is wrong.
On the other hand, this looks like a case in which the only evidence is the statement by the alleged victim, and I also think it's wrong to convict people on that as well; you cannot be certain "beyond a reasonable doubt" merely because someone accuses someone else.
H1B requires they attempt to locate an American to fill the job before giving it to a an immigrant.
That sentence makes no sense. H1B visas are non-immigrant visas; filling an H1B visa means filling a position with a temporary foreign worker. Positions filled with H1B visas do not require job postings.
H1B visas are awarded for specialty occupations, as determined by the US government. The reason so computer programmers can come in on H1B visas is because the US government has determined that there is a shortage in that area. If you don't want any more H1B visas for computer programmers, the US government could simply declare tomorrow that there are enough US programmers.
They routinely go through the motions with the intent of not finding anyone.
Green cards are immigrant visas and require job postings in some cases. And, of course, green-card related job postings are made with the expectation that no US candidate will qualify. There is nothing nefarious about that: if the company were able to fill that position with a US worker, they wouldn't go through the trouble and expense of starting the green card process in the first place! But, again, none of that has anything to do with H1B visas because there are no job posting requirements for H1B visas.
Before you attempt to participate in the immigration debate, you really should get your facts straight and try to understand the basics of the immigration system.
If you didn't live through the start of the open systems revolution you have no idea how messed up things would have been if AT&T had been just another software company like Microsoft, able to act free of regulation.
I did. And, as you may notice, Apple, like Microsoft, is just another software company, free of regulation, which is why I don't trust Apple any more than I trust Microsoft. Futhermore, I also lived through the UNIX wars. Do you remember them? Every UNIX vendor was arguing that they were shipping standard UNIX, only with a better user interface and some useful proprietary stuff on top. That is exactly the argument Apple is making today, and Apple is hurting the UNIX market with that bullshit just like UNIX workstation vendors were hurting each other with it a decade ago.
I have no idea which languages and platforms will be the future for open source, but I do know this much: it will not be something controlled by any of Microsoft, Sun, or Apple, because all three of those companies are competing with open source and would kill it if only they could (except for the parts of open source that does free labor for them, of course--all three of them manage to hoodwink people into that).
Personally, I do most of my development in C, C++, and Python right now, although Mono is getting to the point where it is becoming a realistic choice.
So does Windows NT. That's the same argument that Microsoft used to claim NT was POSIX compliant. Real Windows applications did not use the POSIX API, they used Microsoft's proprietary API. Virtually all real .NET applications, even written under Mono, are going to be written to Microsoft's APIs... not open ones... because damn few people are going to write Mono apps if they don't plan on them being portable to Windows.
b le("foo"));
NT's POSIX compatibility is indeed just a marketing gimmick--nobody uses it. But Mono/Gtk# has lots of actual users. Here is a lost of Mono/Gtk# applications from 2 years ago; many more have been added, and several ship standard with Ubuntu and Debian.
Set your environment variables, start up a Mono app, it doesn't see them because it's running in the same background VM as the one you started three hours ago as a side effect of running some other Mono app for some unrelated purpose.
$ uname -a
Linux box 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Fri Aug 31 00:55:27 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
$ cat test.cs
using System;
public class Test {
public static void Main() {
Console.WriteLine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVaria
}
}
$ mcs test.cs
$ foo=a test.exe
a
$ foo=b test.exe
b
$
I don't have any significant Mono projects right now (although I hope to in the future), but I use several Mono programs on Linux (all of them Gtk#-based) and it's a good platform that a lot of people have invested a lot of their time in. Neither the Mono developers nor end users like myself deserve to be hurt by BSD or Apple fanboy propaganda and lies, so cut it out.
[Cocoa/Objective-C] is more open than .NET and Mono.
Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that that were true. So what? What exactly are you arguing? That open source should try to help Apple kill Microsoft and then leave the desktop market to Apple? Or what?
Come on, in your ideal world, what relationship would you like to see between the open source world, Apple, and Microsoft?